Spring and summer are among the best times of the year in Minnesota. This spring and summer, our department added a new look with which to greet the new seasons. Early this spring, our reception area underwent a significant renovation to provide more space for student services and advising, and to make it more user-friendly, especially for those with disabilities. We also remodeled the back office early this summer to allow for better traffic flow and to improve administrative service productivity. We expect that our new department office will further enhance the department's image, and improve service to our students, faculty and staff.

Space is always a premium in the University. With the addition of many new faculty positions in our department, we are facing a severe shortage of office and laboratory space. However, thanks to the I.T. Dean's office, we are in the process of acquiring some additional space in the Newman Center (1701 University Avenue S.E.), and instructional laboratory space in Lind Hall. We hope that this additional space will relieve our space crunch, at least in the short term.

Late this spring, we concluded another very successful faculty recruiting season. Our faculty recruiting committee, under the leadership of Professor Ravi Janardan, helped recruit three outstanding new faculty members: Loren Terveen (Human-Computer Interfaces from AT&T Bell Laboratories), Yondae Kim (Network Security from the University of Southern California), and Donglin Liang (Software Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology). I extend to them my heartfelt welcome to our department. I should note that this success would not have been possible without the tremendous cooperation that the committee received from our faculty, students, and staff; I thank them for their help.

We have been recruiting faculty strategically in targeted Computer Science and Computer Engineering areas in the last few years. As a result of this concerted effort, the expertise of the faculty in the department now covers virtually all of the major fields in computer science and computer engineering. This has greatly strengthened our curriculum for both the undergraduate and graduate programs. It has also allowed our faculty to work closely with faculty in other departments, such as those in the Medical School, in the emerging area of bioinformatics, in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture on the new Digital Design Initiative, in the Psychology Department in the area of human perception-based computer graphics, and also with several companies, locally and nationally. We strongly encourage such interdisciplinary research cooperation, and we believe it will bear fruit in the coming years.

We have also seen the quality of our students improve over the years throughthe rising GPA requirement for entry into the upper division of our programs. Currently, our GPA requirement is among the highest in the Institute of Technology. Our students have been accepted to top graduate programs and top companies and research laboratories upon graduation. They have been very active in the past year and have garnered awards in various national competitions (see page 8 in this newsletter).

-Pen-Chung Yew